La informalidad laboral en el trabajo doméstico

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(1757).4_{Because the ugly is assumed to be everything the beautiful is not, it}

emerges as a mere tautology. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke sums up the Enlightenment point of view: “It may appear like a sort of repetition ... to insist here upon the nature of Ugliness.”5 _{Although Burke’s binary of the sublime and the}

beautiful does not assert an antithesis between these two aesthetic modes, it adopts a bifurcated approach that Kant will later take up in The Critique of Judgement (1790).6 For while Kant’s third Critique transforms Burke’s empiricist aesthetics substantially, it does not deviate from his basic assumption about the ugly, that it is a shadow form of the beautiful, its silent, invisible partner.

This via negativa of aesthetic theory, however, will not suffice as a hermeneutic mode to account for the positive ugliness of Mary Shelley’s Creature. If the ugly object lacks beauty, the Creature, as the aesthetic object of Frankenstein’s “unhallowed arts” (1831; F, 339), functions more actively than lack. He not only fails to please, he emphatically displeases. And in his relation to the subject, Victor Frankenstein, he manifests precisely the opposite of lack: excess. In a recent psychological foray into the uncharted field of the ugly, Mark Cousins proposes a model of ugliness as excess, which Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek develops in his discussion of “Ugly Jouissance” and which will be useful to us here:

Contrary to the standard idealist argument that conceives ugliness as the defective mode of beauty, as its distortion, one should assert the ontological primacy of ugliness: it is beauty that is a kind of defense against the Ugly in its repulsive existence—or, rather, against existence tout court, since ... what is ugly is ultimately the brutal fact of existence (of the real) as such.7

Unlike the ghostly figments populating the Fantasmagoriana which Shelley originally set out to emulate on the shores of Lake Leman, Frankenstein’s Creature is only too real. He is, like the blood and guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence, exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic spillage from his own representational shell.8 _{While this portrayal might seem analogous to that of the Kantian}

sublime object, in which the representation of the thing [Vorstellung] in empirical form can never adequately present the Thing itself [Ding an sich], we must be careful to distinguish the ugly from the sublime object in order to explore a category not sufficiently accounted for by aesthetic discourse.

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For as this essay will show, ugliness in Frankenstein is less of an aesthetic experience than a question of survival.

Regardless of how we choose to map Victor Frankenstein onto his socio-historical grid, his subject position is radically threatened by the intrusive reality of his Creature. It is important to remember that the Creature’s ugliness did not bother Victor (or anyone else for that matter) before he came to life: “he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion ...” (F, 87). As we shall see, he insists on himself, on the very stuff of his existence, which Victor’s socially (in Lacanian terms, symbolically) constructed identity must, by definition, repress. Although one might point to Victor’s difficulty in laying his hands on the Creature toward the end of the novel as evidence to the contrary, that is, as evidence of the Creature’s insubstantiality, that difficulty has more to do with Victor’s failure to get in touch with his own existence (the “real” Victor) than with any lack of materiality on the part of the Creature himself.9 _{Once we}

confront him, as Victor does, in the raw ugliness of his own existence, we discover that he symbolizes nothing but the unsymbolized: the repressed ugliness at the heart of an elaborate symbolic network that is threatened the moment he bursts on the scene, exposing to view his radically uninscribed existence.

If we are to employ the Freudian vocabulary of repression, however, we must be careful to distinguish the ugly from the uncanny [unheimlich] object, which Freud discusses in similar terms as “everything that ought to have remained ... hidden and secret and has become visible,” and which thus constitutes a return of the repressed in the subject.10_{Like the ugly, the uncanny occupies}

a “remote region” of aesthetics that has been theoretically neglected: The subject of the “uncanny” ... undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as “uncanny” certain things within the boundaries of what is “fearful.”11

Both the uncanny and the ugly fall under the rubric of the fearful; the crucial distinction between them is that while something may be uncanny for one person and yet not so for another, the ugly is universally offensive.

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The uncanny finds its being in whatever object serves to trigger an intrusion of repressed childhood complexes into the mind of the subject; hence nothing is intrinsically uncanny. The Creature’s ugliness, on the other hand, constitutes a return of the repressed not linked to any particular childhood fixation. Instead the Creature appears as a return of what is universally repressed, or what Freud’s precursor, F. W. J. Schelling, considers the horror at the core of all existence. Our concern, consequently, is not with the specific subject of psychoanalysis so much as with ugliness itself. The task will be to discover how Shelley extracts the Creature from the crack opened up by the ugly in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory in order to posit him as that aesthetic impossibility: the positive manifestation of ugliness.

Much critical debate surrounding Frankenstein has focused on the discourse of political monstrosity and how it relates to Victor’s “miserable monster” (F, 87). Fred Botting, for example, surveys the context of political monstrosity from Hobbes to Burke and concludes that monstrosity represents “a complex and changing resistance to established authority.”12

Like the monstrous, the ugly resists, but what it resists is not established authority so much as the aestheticization that enables that very authority. Accordingly, this essay shall address not monstrosity per se so much as the ugliness that precedes and predetermines that monstrosity. Indeed I must agree with Harold Bloom that “a beautiful ‘monster,’ even a passable one, would not have been a ‘monster.’ ”13 _{But what is it about the ugly that}

aesthetic theory cannot face and that inevitably translates into the socio- political discourse of monstrosity?

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke maintains the need for “pleasing illusions” and “superadded ideas” to beautify or “cover the defects of our naked shivering nature.”14_{Mandeville states the case more}

plainly earlier in the century when he writes that “all Men endeavour to hide themselves, their Ugly Nakedness, from each other ... wrapping up the true Motives of their Hearts in the Specious Cloke of Sociableness.”15

As Victor’s experience during the 1790s (when the novel is set) demonstrates, direct exposure of the raw, unaestheticized stuff of humanity (its “Ugly Nakedness”) threatens not only the subject itself, but the entire system of symbolic representation, the disruption of which would constitute the “horrible and disgustful situation” (R, 90) that Burke describes as monstrous:

Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with

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all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind. (R, 11; my emphasis)

What Burke fears is the irruption of the repressed social real through the skin of “pleasing illusions” that contain—and sustain—society. Any fissures in the “system of manners” become infections, “mental blotches and running sores” that inevitably infect the social body with the “contagion of their ill example” (R, 88, 116). Significantly, these particular “running sores” spring from the aristocracy, the luxurious if “miserable great” (R, 116), for it is not only the lower orders that constitute a threat to society: it is whatever threatens to disrupt order as such, to undo those very distinctions.16

Cousins draws upon this notion of “contagion,” proposing that the ugly object appears as “an invasive contaminating life stripped of all signification,” one that “gorges on meaning” as it engulfs the subject with its own lack of meaning, its excessive incoherence.17_{In fact, in Frankenstein, the}

term “ugly” emerges at the precise point when the speaking subject is about to be consumed by such incoherence. Descending the Mer de Glace after a traumatic encounter with the Creature, for example, Victor describes the wind “as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume [him]” (F, 176). While the sirocco is as invisible as wind and hence cannot, strictly speaking, qualify as ugly, his pathetic fallacy is apt. For as the “contaminating life” of the Creature shills out from his overstretched skin to pursue Victor physically and psychologically, it threatens to “consume” him and the entire symbolic order in which he is implicated. Thus while it is couched in admittedly boyish terms, William Frankenstein’s fatal encounter with the Creature—“monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to pieces” (F, 169)—contains a fundamental insight into the nature of ugliness itself: the ugly is that which threatens to consume and disorder the subject. William cries, “Let me go, or I will tell my papa” (F, 169), and it is appropriate that his defense should be a psychological appeal to the Name of the Father, the site of symbolic authority that guarantees the young Frankenstein his ground of meaning in the face of consuming chaos. That the Creature is ready to gorge on that meaning we may infer from his desperate plea, “Child, what is the meaning of this?” (F, 169), which he utters as he draws the boy forcibly toward him, wrenching his hands away from his eyes. Like the aesthetic category of the ugly itself, the Creature cannot be faced.

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I I . T H E B U R K E A N A N T I - D E F I N I T I O N

Since our purpose, however, is to face the ugly, not as inversion or lack but as positive fact, we must first develop it in the darkroom of late eighteenth- century aesthetic theory. Burke’s definition of ugliness is brief and divides into three parts. The first states negatively that the ugly is that which the beautiful is not: “I imagine [ugliness] to be in all respects the opposite to those qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of beauty” (E, 119). To consider the Creature according to Burkean aesthetics, therefore, we must view him in reverse through the lens of the beautiful as the aesthetic object of Victor’s artistic fashioning. Indeed Victor prefers to regard himself not as a scientist so much as “an artist occupied by his favourite employment” (F, 85), selecting disparate harts for their beauty rather than choosing an entire body to reanimate. In a passage reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s original “reverie” (1831; F, 364), in which she first envisioned the Creature, he describes the scene of creation:

... by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (F, 85–86)

Victor’s description takes the form of what might be called an “anti-blazon,” whereby individual features, such as the Creature’s hair “of a lustrous black, and flowing” and “his teeth of a pearly whiteness,” are sutured together with other unsightly features (his “work of muscles and arteries,” his “straight black lips”) that radically disrupt aesthetic representation. As cracks and fissures emerge in the representation, the visceral reality of the Creature leaks through to destroy all fantasy. Despite the fact that Victor specifically chose each feature for its beauty (“I had selected his features as beautiful”), the combined form cannot aesthetically contain its own existence.

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Here Victor’s creative method resembles that which Mary Wollstonecraft ascribes to the sculptors of Greek antiquity: “beautiful limbs and features were selected from various bodies to form an harmonious whole ... It was not, however, the mechanical selection of limbs and features; but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth.”18 _{While in the case of the Greek statue, the sculptor’s “heated}

fancy” manages to contain the hodgepodge of individually selected limbs and features, Victor “went to it in cold blood” (F, 191). As a result, what “burst forth” was not his vision so much as the brute fact of the Creature himself. Coleridge would have condemned this “mechanical selection of limbs and features” as a “mechanical art,” one inherently unable to transform the artist’s materials into a harmonious whole.19 _Following

Francis Hutcheson, who earlier in the eighteenth century had asserted “the universal Agreement of Mankind in their sense of Beauty from Uniformity amidst variety,” Coleridge defined beauty as “multëity in Unity.”20_{“The BEAUTIFUL,” he writes, “is that in which the many, still}

seen as many, becomes one.”21_{If the Creature is not to be seen as a mere}

mechanistic collection of limbs, he must inspire his viewer with the imaginative power necessary to unite his various anatomical components into the totality of a human being. Otherwise, like the “mechanistic philosophy” that Burke complains would “confound all sorts of citizens ... into one homogenous mass” (R, 216), the creation of an individual from anatomical parts, or a social body from parts that are themselves individuals, can be a futile—if not perilous—endeavor.22

What immediately disrupts Victor’s imaginative effort to unite his Creature’s various components into a single totality is the “dull yellow eye of the creature.” It dominates his thoughts, doubling from a single “yellow eye” to two “watery eyes” as he struggles to contain it in representation.23 _He

notices with disgust how the eyeballs are lost in the murkiness, the “dun white” of their surrounding sockets, and he even doubts “if eyes they may be called” (F, 87). Yellow, watery, and dun, the Creature’s eyes are antithetical to the beautiful eye that Burke claims has “so great a share in the beauty of the animal creation” (E, 118). In the section directly before “UGLINESS,” entitled “The EYE,” he writes:

I think then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in its clearness; ... none are pleased with an eye, whose water (to use that term) is dull and muddy. We are pleased with the eye in this view, on the principle upon which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such like transparent substances. (E, 118)

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By focusing on the ideal of transparency, Burke draws attention away from the materiality of the eye itself. While a clear eye serves as a proverbial window into the soul, the Creature’s eye is little more than a reminder of its own existence: a lump of vile jelly attached to the skull. With reference to the “depthless eyes” of Shelley’s Creature, Z˘iz˘ek writes: “The nontransparent, ‘depthless’ eye blocks out our access to the ‘soul,’ to the infinite abyss of the ‘person,’ thus turning it into a soulless monster: not simply a nonsubjective machine, but rather an uncanny subject that has not yet been submitted to the process of ‘subjectivization’ which confers upon it the depth of ‘personality.’ ”24 _{Leaving aside for a moment Z˘iz˘ek’s use of the word}

“uncanny,” his insight is grounded in the Burkean aesthetic theory that serves as context for Frankenstein.

As a mere reminder of its own existence, the Creature’s “depthless” eye serves as the prototype for various hideous progeny, including the “dead grey eye” of Polidori’s vampire, another creature to emerge from the same evening at Villa Diodati:

... some attributed [their fear] to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass.25

If the vampire is opposite to the Creature in that he constitutes an excess of representation over existence, his eye is also opposite to the Creature’s eye. While the latter prevents the viewer from penetrating through to the Creature’s soul, the vampire’s “dead grey eye” cannot penetrate through to the “heart” or soul of his viewer. Both eyes are monstrous, and may be considered opposite sides of the same coin: a facial blob that blocks or clogs imaginative representation. Viewed in these terms, Milton’s insistence that despite his blindness his eyes had remained “as clear and bright, without a cloud, as the eyes of men who see most keenly” may indicate more than aesthetic vanity.26_{What is at stake is his subjectivity as such, a transcendence}

over his own physical existence in the eyes of the world. Thus the invocation (rather, lamentation) to the “heav’nly Muse” in the third book of Paradise Lost—“these eyes, that roll in vain / To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; / So thick a drop serene has quencht thir Orbs”—makes a point of referring to his blindness as one that has not clouded his eyes (the “drop serene” being the Latin medical term for blindness that does not affect the appearance of the eye ).27_{Elsewhere this point becomes central to Milton’s}

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defense against the charge of being “A monster, dreadful, ugly, huge, deprived of sight.”28

Unlike the “dull yellow” or “dead grey” eye, the beautiful eye diverts attention from the substance of the eye itself. Burke writes that “the eye affects, as it is expressive of some qualities of the mind, and its principal power generally arises from this” (E, 118–19). In direct contrast to the Creature’s ugly eye, therefore, stands Victor’s description of the “fair” Elizabeth: “Her brow was clear and ... her blue eyes cloudless ... none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-